FYI,

"LASERS POWER PLANES, DRONES"
DefenseTech
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000658.html

: More than a century ago, Tesla - as famous for his discovery of
: alternating current as for his claim of inventing a giant death ray
: - dazzled onlookers by sending bolts of electricity crackling
: 30 feet through the air. To him this was proof that one day
: information and electricity would be sent across the skies instead
: of through copper cable.

: Since then, Tesla's intellectual descendents have fantasized about,
: and dabbled in, the possibility of reliably transmitting power
: without wires. After decades of on-again, off-again experimentation,
: this Tesla-inspired dream is now showing signs of becoming real, at
: least in a modest way.

: In September, in a hangar in Huntsville, Ala., NASA engineers flew a
: small propeller-driven model plane powered from the ground by a beam
: of laser light. The Army, meanwhile, is looking to finance research
: into laser-charged drone aircraft. And Boeing engineers have already
: built a tiny lunar rover that runs on laser-transmitted energy.

: The "power-beaming" crowd has always been a group of, shall we say,
: ambitious thinkers. Case in point: The Advanced Concepts Team of the
: European Space Agency proposed a network of 1,870 microwave
: power-beaming satellites, each 15 kilometers long – 136 times the
: size of the completed International Space Station. This
: constellation would send energy to 103 receiving bases scattered
: across the globe, each 27 by 30 kilometers big.

"Solar Powered Satellites - European Approach"
ESA ESTEC - Advanced Concepts Team
http://www.idest-paris.org/sps.pdf

: As if on cue, Dr. David Criswell -- the director of the Institute
: for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston -- talked
: up power-beaming to Congress on Thursday.

: "Solar power bases will be built on the Moon that collect a small
: fraction of the Moon's dependable solar power and convert it into
: power beams that will dependably deliver lunar solar power to
: receivers on Earth," he said.

Mark Reiff